Is it possible to make America whole again?

Maybe, somewhere, the most rabid, partisan Democrat is
celebrating, but there's no cause for joy, for anybody, anywhere in this
country. What is happening in the Republican Party right now is embarrassing. And horribly destructive.

As we prepare to elect someone to the country's highest
office, someone who will be among the world's most powerful leaders, three of
the Republican Party's four remaining candidates are making a laughing stock of
the nation. Their grade-school taunts reached a stunning peak recently when (in
events that were televised and remain available online, permanently, for all the world to see), Marco Rubio suggested that Donald Trump
has small hands and, thus, a small "male appendage," as a New York Times writer
put it. And that he may have peed in his pants during a debate.

And some days later, in a nationally televised debate, Trump
responded with this: "Look at those hands. Are they small hands? And he referred
to my hands: if they are small, something else must be small. I guarantee you
there is no problem. I guarantee."

This is an example of the democracy we think the world
should admire - the greatness, I guess, that Donald Trump wants to bring out in
all of us.

Way back in the summer, for a brief moment, I subscribed to
the media herd's conviction that Donald Trump had no chance of being elected.
Now, of course, he certainly does.

And - also "of course" - things got even more troubling this
past weekend: Trump isn't the only horror we might inflict on ourselves and the
world. Ted Cruz won two of the five primaries and caucuses on Saturday and
Sunday and racked up enough delegates that Rubio, who has become the
presidential hope of the Republican establishment, seems likely to join John
Kasich in irrelevancy.

In appearance, Cruz is a less flamboyant, more "stable"
candidate than Trump. But he would be no less of a disaster as president. He,
too, is a nativist, a bully, a belligerent demagogue. His pledge to carpet-bomb
enemies is no less horrifying than Trump's swaggering.

Given how intensely Republican leaders dislike Cruz, they
may soon find themselves embracing Trump. That's how serious the damage is to
the Party of Lincoln.

The bigotry and lust for violence and force that we're
seeing in the Republican presidential campaign aren't new. They've been
brooding - and breeding - in the United States since its founding. And bigotry among
elected officials has been hovering near the boiling point for years, in such
cutely disguised forms as voter registration laws peddled as a protection
against "voter fraud."

In this election campaign, though, some of the Republican
candidates have dispensed with subtlety. They're saying blatantly bigoted
things, urging policies that are anathema to everything this country stands
for. And at campaign rallies, they're whipping crowds into a nativist,
white-supremacist frenzy. This kind of thing has threatened to tear the country
apart before, and it can do it again.

The United States has serious problems and challenges. To paraphrase
a confession from an Anglican prayer of penitence, we have done things we
shouldn't have done, and we've left undone things we should have done. Sadly,
three of the Republican candidates have turned their backs on the teachings of
their religion and the example of Lincoln, threatening to destroy the nation
from within.

And now we seem to be headed toward a general election in
which the Republican candidate will tell Americans that our future lies in fear-inspired
policies of hatred and suspicion at home and swaggering belligerence abroad,
and the Democratic candidate will try to appeal to what Lincoln called "the
better angels of our nature."

I was glad to see Hillary Clinton adopting the slogan "Make
America whole again" as a counterpoint to Donald Trump's patriotic chest
puffing. But at this point, I have no idea which side will win. Do you?